Apparently the film 'the Linguists' has just had its first screening in Washington DC. As a linguistics student myself, I've always felt vaguely guilty about not being especially concerned about language death (or at least relative to other concerns in the world). The loss to a culture's richness and to linguistic study are one thing; but I would consider fluency in a major language (along with inevitable reduction in local languages) generally to be a good thing, even if this means some language death. I really don't see how insisting on language purity is going to help many indigenous people, it seems to be often just a romantic ideal by the west. Of course, in many cases language death is a cause of a sort of cultural imperialism, and a language is very important in the identity of a people, but I'm still not going to see this in anything like the same way as the death of an animal species, for example.

Labels: films, language death, linguistics, linguists