Wikipedia[1] references a source[2] with a pretty good explanation: "As each language dies, many sciences - linguistics, anthropology, prehistory and psycholog

Wikipedia[1] references a source[2] with a pretty good explanation: "As each language dies, many sciences - linguistics, anthropology, prehistory and psychology - lose one more precious source of data, one more of the diverse and unique ways that the human mind can express itself through a language's structure, vocabulary and idiom." Linguistics is obviously most affected. The variety of sounds and grammar used in languages in huge, and we wouldn't know about it without being able to study a lot of languages. I don't know if that has any economic value[3], but then neither does paleontology, but we consider that pretty important, important enough to preserve the available data. Really, as nice as it would be to keep these languages spoken, preserving a complete grammar and audio recording of individual sounds as well as longer spoken passages would be enough for most purposes. But the problem is that this is a lot of work, and languages are going extinct faster than we can document them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_preservation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_preservation [2] http://www.ogmios.org/manifesto/index.htm http://www.ogmios.org/manifesto/index.htm [3] Well OK, some people get paid to invent languages for sci-fi/fantasy and a lot of linguistic data helps with that, but... that's not much.