Languages are the heirlooms of Humanity. We all have them. We all cherish in one form or another what they do for us. They connect us to our local communities and remind us our ancestral pasts. They are personal treasures, but they are also the linguistic libraries containing millennia of knowledge, history (or prehistory rather), and stories.
Today 43% of these treasured heirlooms are disintegrating, mostly due to disruptions in their inheritance. These 3,000 languages are those of the world's small, indigenous, and minority (SIM) communities. Economic forces and social pressures are preventing these languages from being passed down to future generations so that the youngest speakers of many of them are the elderly. No one chooses haphazardly to allow this to happen and what we lose--what we all lose--in the process is threatens us all.
So still, why care? What exactly do we stand to lose when SIM languages die? Let's look at these eight specific reasons:
Because the Loss of a Language Often Coincides with the Loss of Human Rights
Martin Luther King once said, "no one is free until we are all free." Freedom to use the language Breaches in Human Rights anywhere can easily lead to breaches in Human rights everywhere.
Because We Lose the History of Humanity
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Because Language Loss Does Not Lead to Peace
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Because We Lose Scientific Knowledge
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Because We Lose the Verbal Arts and Literature
Every language has its own stories and songs. Each narrative's rhythms and rhymes captivate our minds and inspire our hearts with affirmations of disguised realities, revealing glances at fresh perspectives on age-old human issues, and exhortations toward dearly-held moral values. Stories provide paradigms for solving problems, experiences lived through without people needing to live through them for themselves. The verbal arts and oral literature of SIM language speakers have dealt with these complexities of human nature and moral life. They can be just as enchanting to us as they have been to SIM communities for generations. Imagine if the ancient epic Beowulf had never been written and how 1,000 years later its opening Hwæt! Wé Gárdena in géardagum still pushes us to the edge of our seats. These works are enriching to us all. Their disappearances are a loss to the sum total of human knowledge. These narratives also serve as pertinent, culturally-apt material from which to create literacy materials, furthering the educational and thus socio-economic goals of SIM language communities.
Because We Lose the Chance at a Comprehensive Understanding of What Language Is
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Because We Have to Chance to Help Communities Achieve Socio-Economic Development
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Because Languages Are Interesting
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The Bloomfield Language Institute--named after American linguist and true SIM language champion, Leonard Bloomfield--endeavors to mitigate the problems of the age of Modern Language Extinction by recording and describing the world's SIM languages. Over the next 10 years, we will document all 3,000 of those most vulnerable languages and put forth efforts at their restoration at communities see fit according to their needs. Alone our goals would be futile. But with the everyone's support, we can all ensure that those treasured heirlooms in one form or another reach the eyes, hears, and heart of future generations of Humanity.
