To be completely honest I am not sure if we should care about these languages dieing out. They are obviously dieing out for a reason and that is probably due to the fact that not many people are speaking them. If we were to preserve them I am not quite sure what good that would do in the future. If anyone should take the time to save these languages it should be the people that speak them. If the language is important to them they should make some sort of documentation to ensure that the language will not be forgotten. Otherwise I am not sure that I feel any sort of responsibility to try to preserve something that is only spoken by a small minority of people.
I think language is important to a culture’s identity to a certain extent. The main languages that are used today have strong importance to their cultures, such as English, Greek, Spanish etc. When it comes down to the vase amounts of dialects based off more common languages I do not think they are too important. As I mentioned above if they were truly important to the people who spoke them they would be trying to document in some way themselves instead of letting them fade away.
I am not exactly sure what is lost in a culture when their language becomes extinct. From what I read in the article we are still able to identify the people who spoke the languages. So I would argue that while something is lost we still have some information to rely on.
1 comment:
Not sure.
So I believe that my biggest problem is that I understand most people's point of view and want to understand where everyone is coming from. After reading the articles on the death of languages, I am not quite sure where I stand with how far we should go to preserve them. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love language and think that each one is uniquely amazing and want to speak every one of them. But I also agree with the idea that a language is a living, breathing entity and that it's life is part of the circle of life along with each one of us, we all have our time here. I am sure of one arguement though, and that is that we should let everyone speak their own language and not force them to learn ours, especially if we are invading their space.
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