Hi, I'm a grad student who works on language documentation. At least one prominent field linguist has agreed with your position[0], but most in the field disagr

Hi, I'm a grad student who works on language documentation. At least one prominent field linguist has agreed with your position[0], but most in the field disagree with him. Let me make some point-by-point responses: > People create languages to communicate on an as-needed basis. So there's an assumption that languages exist only because they are "needed". Maybe this is true for pidgins, but where's the necessity in e.g. speakers of Proto-Polynesian moving to different islands, losing contact with each other, and having their languages diverge into Hawaiian, Samoan, Tuvaluan, etc.? For the most part, the creation of something we recognize as a distinct language is an unconscious process and is guided by incidental facts like physical location and resulting contact patterns with other language-communities. > And languages that aren't needed anymore [...] fall away. I think this is a strange way to put things, and that it could distort some facts about why people lose their ancestral languages. Often languages _do_ cease to be spoken because of, say, economic and bureaucratic reasons, but when this happens it'd be simplistic to look on and say that this is the natural order of things. Many American Indian languages ceased to be spoken in the 19th century because the United States tore Indian children from their parents and put them many miles away in English-only Christian boarding schools where they were physically punished if they ever spoke a word of their mother tongue[1]. It is an odd kind of necessity here that drove American Indians from their languages. > I'll be thrilled if every language in the world disappears except for one, and we all communicate in it. I don't care which one, although ideally it'll be a simple or logical one, like Indonesian/Malay, with a writing system like Hangul. Even if we snapped our fingers and everyone in the world suddenly spoke Malay written in a perfectly regular writing system, there's a lot of reason to think that the global language would quickly fragment into many languages again. This would be due to many forces, but two big ones among them would be plain old isolation from the rest of the world (e.g. in the highlands of Papua New Guinea) and the fact that changing the way you speak is a very powerful way of signaling your identity and ideological alignments[2]. More generally, as others have pointed out, people who believe in the value of documenting endangered languages do so most commonly because they believe in the general anthropological value of such data, the specific linguistic value of the data as another data point we can use to investigate the nature of language in general, and last but not least, the value of giving the communities who speak these languages the ability to draw on these records should they ever desire to develop their language. [0]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/416854 https://www.jstor.org/stable/416854 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schoo... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_(linguistics)