A few days ago I ran across an article in the New York Times about the loss of “linguistic diversity.” I was pleasantly surprised to see only the reasonable suggestion that it’s important to record linguistic information before it is lost (something I think is definitely important and worth doing). While I still bristled at the undefeased¹ analogy with biodiversity (and the harms of losing it) it was a welcome change from the standard sort of breathless warnings about the loss of linguistic diversity which often feature absurd warnings like the following.

“I claim that it is catastrophic for the future of mankind,” Krauss said. “It should be as scary as losing 90 percent of the biological species.”

“That is somehow interdependent such that we lose sections of it at the same peril that we lose sections of the biosphere,” Krauss said. “Every time we lose (a language), we lose that much also of our adaptability and our diversity that gives us our strength and our ability to survive.”

Now I don’t have the slightest clue how valuable biodiversity really is but at least (other things being equal) it is valuable. When diseases come along a less genetically diverse group of organisms is significantly more likely to be entirely wiped out. Science fiction books like “Snow Crash” and hyperbolic warnings from prescriptivists of the imminent collapse of civilization aside I know of no linguistic disease threatening to wipe out our species.

Other attempts to motivate concern aren’t much better.

Romaine said that if one-fifth of the world’s buildings were endangered, architects would care. Linguists should therefore care in protecting languages, no matter where or by whom they are spoken, she said.

I would be highly surprised if one-fifth of the world’s buildings weren’t ‘endangered’ but I somehow doubt that the royal architecture society is issuing press releases about the danger of people upgrading from huts to modern housing. No better is the justification given in National Geographic.

More than half of the world’s 7,000 languages are expected to die out by the end of the century, often taking with them irreplaceable knowledge about the natural world, Harrison said. …. When a language is lost, centuries of human thinking about animals, plants, mathematics, and time may be lost with it, Swarthmore’s Harrison said.

The only problem with this justification is that it doesn’t make one jot of sense. Now it may happen that generally people abandon old traditions and old languages about the same time but if this knowledge is really so important it makes a lot more sense to just pass it on in whatever language people are shifting towards. Moreover, I strongly suspect that the value of traditional wisdom is wildly exaggerated. Folk wisdom resembles Borges infinite library in many respects. There are a great many facts recorded there but they are so difficult to extract and so inextricably intermingled with falsehoods that it is often more efficient just to start all over.

Of course this brings us directly to the old-chestnut that somehow different languages enable different kinds of thoughts so we are really losing valuable ways of conceptualizing the world. Ignoring for a moment that there isn’t a shred of evidence for any sufficiently strong form of this proposition² if true it would actually suggest that language death is an important process to weed out the inferior ways of conceptualizing the world.

Alright so we don’t have a whole lot of reason to fear the loss of linguistic diversity but maybe it’s aesthetically pleasing so what’s the harm? Well actually quite a bit. Differing languages present a huge barrier to understanding and communication (not to mention encouraging animosity and nationalistic hate). Just imagine if all 50 US states spoke different languages. Do you really think the US would have become as economically, scientifically and academically competitive as it is today with language limiting cooperation between the states? Even if each and every american learned five languages most interstate projects would still be unable to find a language that everyone involved could understand.

Adopting a universal language (or several very widely spoken ones) while trying to keep most traditional languages afloat isn’t a much better solution. Either many people are only poorly conversant in the common language creating inefficiencies and discouraging the free flow of ideas, we discourage cross cultural friendships or the small languages die out anyway. If everyone speaks english (or mandarin or whatever) fluently and just one of your friends doesn’t know your traditional language you will all switch to using english while hanging out. Since few people learn more than five languages even minor amounts of cross cultural mingling will make the common language the default and if even a few people get lazy the traditional languages will die out. The only solution is to create the sort of cultural/nationalistic pride that looks down on people who don’t know your traditional tongue which not only creates inefficiency but encourages the sort of nationalism/culturalism that encourages hatreds and starts wars. I mean does anyone really think it is a coincidence that nations who speak the same language tend to have friendlier relations?

Even ignoring all of this retaining your traditional language requires expending resources to learn it and use it. The time that people spend learning their traditional language is time they could have spent learning mathematics or learning a language that will let them communicate with more outsiders. Ultimately trying to keep their native language afloat is an investment of time and effort that many native people around the world have decided just isn’t a worthwhile way to spend their limited resources. Ironically instead of seeing this as a change for the positive some people actually lambast language death because it happens to the poorest cultural groups.

Romaine noted that there are some linguists who claim that language death is a natural process that should not be interrupted. Romaine also said that most language death affects indigenous peoples that are poorly-equipped to prevent it. “Language death does not happen in the privileged communities, it happens to the dispossessed and disempowered,” she said.

Not only does this argument assume the consequent (language death is bad) it reflects a snobbish “let them eat cake” attitude. Wasting resources that you could have used to improve your situation on maintaining a traditional language for purely sentimental reasons is a luxury that only those with excess resources can afford. It makes about as much sense to complain that the poor are the ones most likely to be losing their languages as it does to complain that the poor are the ones lest likely to own Rolex’s. What’s needed is ways to bring them out of poverty not to make them spend their limited resources on luxury goods that those of us in rich countries find attractive. Frankly, I find it kinda ghastly that we would tell these poor groups that their decision about what languages to speak wasn’t good enough for us and that they should go back and spend more of their time learning dead languages so they can serve as living museums for us rather than improving their lot like we did.

Still even all of this misses the biggest cost of this sort of rhetoric, loss of public concern for real harms occurring around the world. There is only so much space in the public consciousness for this sort of breathless rhetoric and concern about linguistic diversity competes with concern about global warming and loss of biodiversity. If people hear enough scary rhetoric like this only to have it come to nothing they will eventually stop being so concerned. Given all the apparently scientific concern for this sort of thing is it any surprise that the whole global warming thing is still meeting with a great deal of resistance. What really needs to happen is that scientists need to take a long view and vocally disassociate themselves from this sort of moralizing rhetoric rather than provide the raw data and become meekly silent while someone turns it into a moral crusade. Whether it is in environmentalism or linguistics the public will wrongly credit the warning to science as a whole unless scientists are much more forceful in separating the science from the moral cause.