I am not particularly well equipped to answer this, and would welcome someone doing a better job, but I don't want to see this stand as the top comment and not

I am not particularly well equipped to answer this, and would welcome someone doing a better job, but I don't want to see this stand as the top comment and not see a strong counter-argument. In any case, the simple argument for why languages are important goes something like this: A different language is more than just a different way of sharing information; it's a different way of interacting with ideas, and it reflects a different cultural history, and a diversity of cultural histories is fundamental to maintaining our heritage. When we lose languages (and we _do_ lose languages, all the time) we lose histories, traditions, and knowledge, and we also lose a specific and irreplaceable tool for looking at the world. It also unlikely that we will ever cohere on a single spoken language, especially as tools like good neural-machine translation become much more powerful and more readily available. - http://www.endangeredlanguages.com http://www.endangeredlanguages.com