Should a dying language be "saved"? Preserving cultural heritage is all very well, but expending a child's language-acquisitive resources on a language which won't connect them to the rest of contemporary humanity seems far too high a price.
That's a good point. I think there's a tendency to conflate the idea of "lost knowledge" with "inactive practice" when it comes to dying languages. Record, preserve, archive information about a language, as much as possible, but to say that all languages must remain "alive" means that we're saying that some portion of humanity must expend the time and effort to remain multilingual in languages that they may not receive practical benefits in. Maintenance costs of "in-brain preservation" are relatively high, and in doing so that's allocating time that may or may not be spent in pursuits that are beneficial to the actual people whom some want to be vessels for a dying language.
Languages don't "die", they are smothered by a society hostile to the community that speaks them. That may be outright genocide (as in the article), or it may be something as simple as forcing children to go to attend school in a language foreign to them, that offers zero recognition of their mother tongue. The kids may have to learn the content in a foreign language, and they are denied even so much as a hour-a-week class on the literature of their native language.
A system that is intent on eradicating the cultural heritage of a people is not trying simply to do only what is beneficial for the kids. =/
This comment is predicated on an assumption that I'm not sure has a foundation in science: that a child's "language-acquisitive resources" are finite in some way, or that a child learning a minority language won't "have room" for other subjects because of it. Because many, many children in the world speak one language at home and another at school, I'm not sure there is any foundation for this assumption.
What does have a foundation in science (or reality) is that the teaching of another language means a child won't have room in their daily schedule for other things.
There's only so much time in the day. If a child is learning math and science and their main language and other skills for seven hours, sleeps for eight hours, and eats for two hours, that only leaves seven hours in the day to fit in everything else, including play time and exercise.
That's the limit on learning languages. We're only good at our first language because we spend our entire lives practicing it. It takes hours and hours and hours of practice and studying to learn another, even as a child. Double that if it's not a commonly spoken language.
In Switzerland, it might be possible for everyone to speak English, German, French, Italian, and Romansh if you're around people who speak it for your entire life. But if a child is actually being taught these languages, let's say an hour each day... well what time is there left for anything else? Sure it might not push other knowledge out of their brain, but if it pushes other knowledge out of their reach due to not having time to learn other subjects, that's even worse. How much time will they put in learning a dying language, and what other, more useful knowledge could they have gained otherwise?
>what other, more useful knowledge could they have gained otherwise?
How does one rank the usefulness of knowledge? Language acquisition (and the acquisition of a particular language) is not a skill in isolation. It enhances other skills such as problem solving, logical inference, the ability to recognize patterns, knowledge synthesis... skills I daresay are useful in other fields, such as computer programming. I hear your argument a lot among people who just plain don't like learning languages and think it's "worthless," or that they'll "never use it" -- but the same thing could be said of some mathematical disciplines. However, there is little doubt that those mathematical disciplines contribute to other areas of knowledge.
A partial case study: In Wales ~100% of the population speak English. In the last UK census the numbers who responded that they could _speak_ any old Welsh, Cymraeg, was < 16%. In the city region I live in Cymraeg is at such low demand by parents that there are no secondary schools that use it (except as a subject, like you'd learn a foreign language). Excepting a handful of Patagonians and some ex-pat Welsh there is nowhere outside the country to speak Cymraeg and there is nowhere in the country that it is needed.
However, all primary school children are forced to use "incidental Welsh" in every single subject lesson. In my kids school there are Urdu, Mandarin, Swedish, Spanish speaking kids .. but none that speak Cymraeg at home as a domestic language.
Most people who can speak some Cymraeg can't write in it and aren't fluent. Of those that are fluent the majority 75-80% use English for emails and texts and social media (per a recent study by the Office of the Welsh Language Commissioner).
Yet still, all subjects in primary school are hobbled by backward looking misguided nationalism - at present rates the only kids who will use Cymraeg in a job post-school are those in the Welsh Language Commission.
It serves no useful purpose for the kids but it's treated as more important than maths, science, English, ...
Now, I've nothing against languages. I find them fascinating but in mainstream education languages should be taught first as a means of communication. If people want to learn them later so they can hide away and not talk to people from other cultures that's fine - but that's not what compulsory schooling should be about.
Aside, how does language learning of itself improve problem solving?
Does knowing about the country you live in really have so little value? Maybe it's not the only valuable thing in the world, but knowing about the culture of the society you live in sure seems like it would be valuable...?
Welsh has been largely abandoned in Cardiff and southern Wales, but there are large sections of the country where at least a quarter of the population speaks Welsh, and in other places 65-80% of people speak Welsh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language#/media/File:Wel...
>Does knowing about the country you live in really have so little value? //
Does communication have so little value that you'd choose an anachronistic minority language that a small proportion of the native population understand - and an even smaller proportion prefer in daily communication - in favour of a modern, widely used, language?
History has its place but there is very little of use to the majority that is gained by using minority languages - recently I was looking at an artistic Kufic Arabic script and at other times have studied (briefly) historic languages to understand other peoples, but there's no need to learn Cymraeg to understand Welsh people when you are one speaking the language of your people modern Welsh (aka English, that is seemingly dismissed for its name).
Ranking between categories is hard. But within a category it is much easier. Adding a language like Mandarin, for example, provides very similar mental utility as some dying tongue, but additionally gives the child a useful communication tool later in life.
>Adding a language like Mandarin, for example, provides very similar mental utility as some dying tongue, but additionally gives the child a useful communication tool later in life
Really? How, exactly? Will a significant number of these countries be doing business directly with Chinese counterparts ...who don't already speak English? As someone who learned Mandarin, I can promise that the vast majority of its benefits I've had to go out of my way to enjoy.
Why should the small number of people who will find any use at all out of Chinese be valued more than maintaining a language that is significant to their heritage?
Diglossia is very, very common worldwide, and many languages have a different functional distribution. In Morocco, kids may speak Berber at home, Arabic on the street, French in school. In other places, you may learn math and science in an international language and literature in a mother tongue.
Bilingualism is very common worldwide; people being bilingual isn't actually a big problem that you need to use state resources (schools and education policy) to stamp out mother tongues.
And as Joshua Fishman points out, if society isn't supporting minority mother tongues, then it is opposing them.
Agreed (in fact, given my anecdotal experiences with polyglots from places like Switzerland or Scandinavia, I wouldn't be at all surprised by the finding that learning one language at a young age actually increases facility in other languages).
And taking another tack, I think it's important to keep in mind that languages are also vehicles for irreplaceable cultural information that might not be translatable. When we talk about the loss of a language, we're also talking about the loss of conceptual models, epistemologies, turns of phrase, oral traditions, jokes, etc that may be the result of tens of thousands of years of cultural continuity.
The limited amount of Chinese that I learned and remember from a multi-week workshop that I attended in 4th grade has been more useful than whatever else would have been done during that time.
After having a child, I've become far more conscious of people who have lots of concerns about everyone's children. If learning Gaelic or Navaho instead of something else is a problem, it's not one that I'm worried about. Well rounded education is more important to me.
There is a particularly human egotism with respect to "saving" things that have outlived their usefulness and purpose, or preserving things that should be changing. If language can be viewed through its evolutionary purpose, these dying languages are simply experiments that did not pan out, and should be allowed to become extinct.
Many of these cultures (including their language) were forcefully banned, obliterated by law, lynching, displacement. discriminatory treatment, and the stealing of children. I do not exaggerate. So don't pretend they are dying of natural causes when the knife is still sticking out of their back.
To play the devil's advocate, maybe they deserve to die out. If they would have innovated and conquered first, their language could have lived and ours could be the one on its deathbed. Survival of the fittest, if you will.
The devil has enough advocates. Every time the words "to play the devil's advocate..." cross your brain, just punch yourself in the face instead. Soon the urge will pass.
Every time you feel like posting a snarky reply on Hacker News, go fuck yourself.
It's an honest question and I was hoping for some interesting answers. I was hoping someone would come along and have something interesting a la Jarred Diamond's "Guns, Germs, & Steel"[0] that may explore what role languages had on development of cultures, similar to the aforementioned book's exploration of the development of civilizations and how that led to the fateful interactions that have shaped the modern world.
No, instead of an insightful answer, let's just let our liberal outrage fly at a comment that could not possibly have any good or real intent behind it. I'm clearly just a neo-Nazi posting up in here in HN, advocating the destruction of those damn Injuns! God forbid one uses a rhetorical device!
If I thought you were arguing in good faith, I'd say something like: you are wasting your time running toxicology screens on a patient with the knife hilt still protruding. It's intensely unsubtle what happened: the languages were banned, boarding schools beat kids for talking anything but English, and so on.
However, I feel that nobody plays devil's advocate in good faith. In the worst case it's a shallow wrapper for "lets pretend my hate is a hypothetical" or in the best, "lets spend a few minutes kicking the skulls of innocents down the road, merely for idle argument's sake." Which evinces such a callous disregard it's hardly better than the former.
Not every dead language is a result of a genocide. My question stands on it's own, and there is more to it than what you imply. Yes, the most obvious, ready examples are what you say, but not all.
That's not really reasoning, just self-fulfilling prophecy. Hebrew was revived, and I can't see a solid reason why the same could not be done on a smaller scale.
The question isn't can a language be revived, it is should a language be revived. I am of the opinion that it was a mistake to revive Hebrew, as doing so has needlessly introduced language barriers.
When do songs and poetry written in a particular language outlive their usefulness and purpose?
When I feel pity for an endangered language it's usually not because I want to read user manuals or order pizza, but because so many works of art will be lost.
More than 90% of their community was slaughtered in the Selk’nam Genocide, and the survivors were resettled in a mission camp. This is like saying that Yiddish in Germany in the 20th century was an "experiment that didn't pan out."
There is no need to pretend that what happened to these communities was ethically neutral.
My girlfriend is a linguist with a particular passion for dying languages and cultures. I often find myself asking the same question every time she talks about it. I think the more important factor than usefulness in society is the fact that, like the article said, being the last of anything is lonely. For me, at least, that is a particularly hard position to empathize with because my culture is incredibly widespread and probably isn't going anyway. So, while I can't or don't understand the feeling, I think it's important to allow these people at least the little justice of trying to respect and preserve their cultural heritage.
“The older people are the only ones who can tell you what their youth stands to lose,” he said. “The young are the only ones who can articulate the loss of an identity rooted in a mother tongue that has become foreign to them.”
I work in Navajo language education. Most insecurity in Navajo adults derives from this single disconnect. It seems later in life, in those that have connected "to the rest of contemporary humanity" at the expense of learning their language, give up because of the complexity of the language, especially the verb.
This just means the last speakers are hoping to pass their insecurity problem on to another group of new "last speakers" to suffer it for them. Nothing against an individual having that desire, but for a 3rd party to help them, it's really doing any overall good. It's just moving the problem to somebody else.
Yes. Because each language holds concepts that are unique.
A language is more than a collection of symbols that can be replaced arbitrarily with another language. Languages, particularly indigenous languages, contain ideas and ways of understanding that are not directly translatable. When we lose the language, we lose that people's take on the world.
It is a sad thing, intellectually and spiritually, to lose the unique perspective of a people who have survived for millennia. Globalism is great; homogeneity is not so great.
Would you be able to provide some examples of these untranslatable concepts or ways of thinking? I suspect that the fact that you can provide them, in English, means that English is as capable as any other language to at absorbing that idea and making it expressible.
If different languages contain unique ways of thinking that can't be expressed in other languages, then what benefit is there to the preservation of that language? If the idea cannot be communicated outside its language, then what impact can it have on the world outside it? If it can be communicated, then why not simply use loanwords (as languages like English are very prone to doing) to absorb that particular concept into the set of concepts that can be expressed in the language?
I'll try to share some examples in a bit. Short reason this approach is "lossy": it's a huge game of telephone. Translation retains most of the translated concept, but not all of the concept's subtleties. The farther removed we get from the original, the less faithful the translation. We see this most clearly where it takes a paragraph of English to start to communicate the meaning contained in one word from some languages.
Simple example: translate namaste into one English word.
I come at this from a context of living in Alaska, and seeing firsthand the value of language retention, and the tragedy of language loss. I've also had great benefit from digging into other cultures' world views, and each of those experiences was heavily dependent on paying attention to the nuances of older languages. These concepts are hard to grasp if this whole topic is approached from a strictly academic context.
Why does it need to be translated into a single English word? This is the power of "preserving language as reference": I can look up the meaning and cultural context of "namaste," gain that information, and then I can use the word "namaste" as a loanword if there's not a suitable short word in English that conveys the same idea. That's how loanwords happen.
Words aren't these indivisible blocks that exist in the universe outside of us. When we first learn what, for example, a "fish" is, we don't do a lookup in a mental dictionary for the brain-word that means "fish." We learn that whole paragraph about how fish are animals that swim in water and have gills and fins, etc. Then we come up with a name for that swimmy-water-animal-thing, and move on.
If a foreign word or concept is not sufficiently similar to anything readily available in a language, that language grabs the foreign word as a loanword and moves on. That's what languages do. This means it's valuable to have this as a reference, but perpetual storage -- redundancies and all -- in the brains of generation after generation seems inefficient and burdensome to the brains who actually have to expend effort to store it and also compete in a global society. If they want to, more power to them, but I don't know if that's the best mandated investment of resources/time.
The meanings and subtleties of English words also change over time. For a topical example, there's a front page article on Reddit on how Homer Simpson is distinguishing between jealousy and envy, a distinction that is being lost in modern usage.
I have a friend who writes screenplays. One of the more difficult things is getting the language correct for period pieces. It's hard to tell what turns of phrase would be out of place in, say, the 40's, and what would be in place.
Going back a little further, nobody alive knows what the Confederate "rebel yell" actually sounded like.
English is an open source language. It gets extended as needed. Schadenfreude is a word with no equivalent in English, so a big number of English people use schadenfreude as a direct way of expressing the concept.
As long as the language is extensible then I don't see a major problem with translation losses, because they can just get incorporated into the language of the day.
I get that each language has ways of describing certain things better than others, and those superior language features are likely tied directly to the culture that originally created the language. I just think that the cost of maintaining a large amount of languages might. T be worth it.
Diglossia and bilingualism is very, very common in the world and probably the norm for humans: large monolingual countries are exceptional. Even in monolingual situations, people invent different registers for different formal situations. There is no reason that different linguistic codes cannot coexist for different functions.
This argument can easily be extended to the other national languages: Preserving a national language like Italian or French is all very well, but English is the language of international communication, science, and technology, and expending a child's language-acquisitive resources on a language which won't connect them to the rest of contemporary humanity seems like too high of a price.
The reason some languages are "dying" is because colonial powers attempted to exterminate those people and their community, through a variety of uses of power. In the article, the colonists exterminated more than 90% of the population and sent the survivors to a concentration camp. Just horrible. There's no reason to pretend that this community's precarious cultural position occurred through ethically neutral events.
Nonsense, of course it is. I'm raising bilingual children and every one of them has developmental delays. Of course the plural of anecdote is not data, but as a result I've been quite motivated to keep up with the research. My family is not exceptional among bilingual families. Developmental delays are common, as are poor performance in elementary school as multi-lingual children struggle to integrate disjoint systems of knowledge.
Of course I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think it was absolutely worth it, but the idea the children are sponges that pick up language without trouble at all is a myth that needs to die. Children do learn languages faster and better than adults, but IMHO that is mostly due to (a) time, (b) motivation, and (c) adult learners rationalizing their failures rather than actually trying to learn.
EDIT: But to be clear, although it is not my place to tell anybody what to do, I do wish speakers of dying languages would pass on their words and culture to their children. It's hard, but worthwhile IMHO.
The theory that raising children in a multilingual environment impaired development was common in the 70s, but since then an overwhelming amount of evidence has debunked it. The commonly held view now is that raising a child in a multilingual environment will have no impact on how fast the child reaches developmental milestones.
An anecdote to counter yours: I am French, my wife is Japanese and we live in Barcelona in Spain where the school is in catalan. Our four years old understands Japanese and Catalan quite well (similar to a monolingual kid) and can speak French, English and Spanish a bit (I speak to him in French, adn with my wife we speak English) but not as well as a monolingual kid. Ofmcourse we have to see how it will turn out for him, but to me in terms of languages he's pretty much like a sponge.
Are the developmental delays long term, or just focused in primary/ else tardy grades? I've been envious of my peers who grew up bilingual; none appeared delayed when I knew them in late middle school and beyond. In fact, they seemed more academically capable than my monolingual peers.
Early. They seem to pull it together around age 10 plus or minus a few years. Statistically speaking -- every child is different. Mine are still young enough to have persistent problems.
There's a substantial scientific literature arguing that learning multiple languages as a child actually confers many cognitive benefits. I don't know how credible it is.
To all the tourists that want to stop people from talking to each other in order to have the vague aesthetic feeling that "the world is diverse" or whatever floats your tourist boat: Why don't you go and do that with your own child?
Go on, raise them in a language that will limit their life choices and potential. See how that works for them. Then have them tell us how that went. Oh, sorry, that won't happen so easily, now, would it?
"Linguistic diversity" Is just another way to say "Communication barriers".
Funny how is is always something that should happen to other people.
> raise them in a language that will limit their life choices and potential.
False dilemma. You can raise a bilingual child, in no way limiting their life choices and potential. In fact, there is evidence that suggests that bilingualism provides cognitive benefits later in life.
I'm wondering if the people who are railing against saving languages are equally against organizations such as the Internet Archive? My thinking is that, as tech-savvy computer whizzes, many folk on Hacker News are happier to preserve something that makes sense to _them_ (media or website snapshots) than things that don't (languages and foreign cultural history). It's difficult to say what is useful without the benefit of hindsight, by which time it is a moot point -- the resource is long gone and will never be again. Anyways, just my two cents as an incredibly biased amateur archivist.
I see that as an apples to oranges comparison. When we say "saving languages," do we mean archiving them, backing them up, creating stores of references and recordings that can be easily recalled yet inexpensively preserved? If so, then I am definitely for that. If "saving languages" means accepting nothing less than the descendants of the speakers of a dying language needing to expend mental energy and time to remain active speakers of that language, placing them at a disadvantage when compared with those who have free time for other pursuits and contributing to segregating that group from others, I don't know if that's as beneficial.
In general, all knowledge should be preserved when possible. The question is whether it's better for it to be stored on hard drives or in brains.
Good question :) not sure I have a good answer for that one, although I'd like to point out that many people elect to expend mental energy on otherwise unproductive minutia (aka. hobbies) so perhaps the task of carrying on a spoken tradition is less onerous to some than one might expect.
Language contributing to group segregation is a very strong claim, however, and if you have any case studies (or, like, newspaper articles, this isn't academia) I'd be interested in seeing them.
Every child must expend enormous energy to learn their mother language, but the human mind is not a cup that can hold but one language. Bilingualism and diglossia are the human norm, not monolingualism. Language is a human right, and parents have a right to teach their children their heritage.
Languages are only ever "dying" because of state coercion aimed at robbing children of their cultural heritage.
Storing away all of geocities for future reference is a good thing. Having every children memorize passages from geocities would be pointless and no one does it.
Having them learn a dead language is cruel, you are wasting their time to make them learn something that will only serve to keep them isolated.
And it's all in vain, making a language alive is the opposite of preserving it because live languages change.
No-one is arguing that children from minority communities should be prevented from learning an international language. The only question is whether they should be prevented from learning the language of their heritage.
Multilingualism is the norm. And it's easy enough to learn Math in English, English in English, and literature in your mother tongue.
It may end up being Mandarin. Although Beijing, despite half a century of trying, hasn't been able to convert the Guangdong and Hong Kong areas. Only about 53% of China's own population has good fluency in Standard Chinese.
I doubt it. There might be more people with Mandarin as a native language, but English has far more adoption amongst non-native speakers. Most Europeans, for example, know some English.
I agree a common language is beneficial, but choosing English as the one is not without drawbacks.
As someone who speaks both English and a tad of Chinese, I am aware of instances where there are words in either language that can't be easily said in the other.
You'd think with a good enough command of English and logic you could necessarily translate any word of any other language in the universe.
However, I suspect it is not that simple. Some words invoke particular neuronal activity that encodes a particular thought which may be hard to replicate through the usage of a clumsy translation. Thus a difference in language may also be a reflection of a difference in culture and way of thinking.
Since people around the world care about different things, they will use different words more frequently, attach different connotations to them, and even invent new words whose usage you'd find to be isolated to particular geographical regions. So, the selection of a common language is almost like the selection of a particular way of thinking. The notion of cultural uniformity/superiority can rub people the wrong way.
So if there is to be a common language, it would be more considerate if it incorporated features from different languages, rather than be entirely from one language (English), and it should probably be engineered to be somewhat culturally agnostic.
All of humanity speaking one language, and having multiple languages, are not actually mutually exclusive.
Diglossia and multilingualism are the norm. There's no reason why people can't speak a mother tongue at home and in a local community, and use an international language for math, science, and travel.
The question is whether people should be coerced into abandoning their mother tongue.
I'd rather everyone speak two languages: their local/cultural tongue and an invented language that the world shares and could contribute to, such as Lojban or Esperanto.
Esperanto could work, or even Interlingua but how about Lojban get even a few native speakers before proposing it as THE language of international communication. Even a few fluent speakers? ;)
It's just an effort to raise the prestige of Mohawk. Like all the disinformation about how English is just essential to everyone's economic future.
The prestige of English is wide but shallow: everyone's just in it for the money, and if something nicer shows up, the world will abandon English in a heartbeat.
If a language has spiritual value (like Latin, Sanskrit, or Classical Arabic), that's tapping into a narrower but deeper source of prestige.
> The mother tongue of more than three billion people is one of twenty, which are, in order of their current predominance: Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, Javanese, German, Wu Chinese, Korean, French, Telugu, Marathi, Turkish, Tamil, Vietnamese, and Urdu.
Arabic listed as one language? Can Gulf Arabic and Moroccan Arabic speakers understand each other? I've heard people speak to each other where one speaks Spanish and the other Brazilian Portuguese. The main difference between Hindi and Urdu is the different script. Don't those languages have more justification for being counted as one than those of Arabic? It's even a bit iffy to count English as one language -- put 3 people speaking Indian English, Ebonics, and Geordie in a room together and see how well they communicate!
Quantifying the difference between a language and a dialect is always going to be a problem. English dialects differ, but most English speakers also know well a standard variety of American or Commonwealth stock (which are mutually intelligible).
Distangling the Chinese languages is another huge problem, since the government of China sees them as all dialects of a single language, but any real comparison of phonology, syntax, or lexicon shows them to be quite distinct indeed.
My understanding is the syntax of Hindi and Urdu are very similar, but the lexicon is quite distinct. Since each has either a relatively more a Persianized or Sanskritized vocabulary.
In Scotland, there is a big movement to preserve the teaching of Gaelic. Whilst I think it is important to preserve culture and to preserve history, I don't think, in terms of youth education, that should outweigh the utility of skills and languages necessary for the modern world.
It seems slightly obtuse to me that whilst do not teach computer science, programming, engineering or science particularly well in schools, we should worry about the preservation of teaching of old languages. That being said, I think it is extremely important to teach kids (and the public in general) about history as a way of avoiding past mistakes so I don't think we should eliminate it - I just think there are more important things we need to fix first.
The scots preservation of Gaelic is much less than in Ireland. When I was in school, I took Irish classes from when I was 5 until I left, as do the vast majority of children. Most Irish people have at least a handful of words and phrases they know. All of the road signs and government communications are translated into Irish.
(Disclaimer: I am Irish, and I do not agree with the mandatory nature of Irish lessons.)
The fact that 12-13 years of taking Irish classes daily leads to most Irish people having a few words and phrases is a damning indictment of our education system. It is also a perfect example of how saving a language that has fallen out of use is incredibly difficult. All that effort teaching a language to a country and, because it is almost never used outside of the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking areas, mostly in the west of the country) it has been my experience that most people very rapidly lose their ability in Irish after leaving school.
I have long held the position that forcing children to learn a dead (or at the very least, on advanced life support) language is doing more harm than good. It instilled antipathy towards Irish more than love for Irish in my peers. Making it an optional subject would mean only people who cared would study it, and they would perhaps be more likely to try and use it.
Gealic is not mandatory. English-only schools in west of ireland are underfunded. Parents could sign their children into English school with 50 another kids in single class, or into Geelic school with 20 children in class.
Irish is mandatory. All primary and secondary school students are required to learn Irish, normally around one hour per day on average. Our secondary school graduation exam (the Leaving Cert) has precisely one mandatory subject: Irish [1].
My mother is a primary teacher in a non-Gaelscoile (school taught through Irish), so I am well aware of the institutional funding bias that exists and agree it is completely unfair. It is another ill-thought out attempt by our Department of Education to prop up a failing system.
[1] Many Irish universities require English, Maths and a second language (Irish, French, German would be the most common). However if you don't want to go to college you don't need to sit those exams.
Anything important enough to do well can instead be done badly.
Education policy in the West, but until the late 20th century, was oriented towards exterminated the use of minority languages. Consequently, there wasn't much experience until recently with policies to regenerate linguistic communities after oppression.
Mandating some minimal classroom instruction for non-mother-tongue speakers is exactly the kind of ineffective policies that people like Joshua Fishman criticize. More efforts these days is going into mother tongue preschools and "nests".
Side note: A couple of years ago I found myself working with a Welsh engineer who told me he learned English first as a teenager. Still almost can't believe it but he was very serious about it.
In Ireland, we have the Gaeltacht [1], which are areas where Irish is the primary language. I know a couple of older people who grew up in a Gaeltacht and only learned English in school, never using it at home. This would be much less likely nowadays, hard to avoid English on the Internet etc
That said, it's interesting that language has only a very limited input into the Scots' sense of nationhood, as contrasted with the Welsh for whom it is far more central.
These articles appear from time to time but they never give any sensible reason. Just take it as given that languages must be saved. This one has a long diversion into indigenous medicine - not something that needs a language, but rather needs knowledge, using any language. Here's the closest thing I found to a reason though I only read half way:
"But the loss of languages passed down for millennia, along with their unique arts and cosmologies, may have consequences that won’t be understood until it is too late to reverse them."
It would be nice if the human mind were flexible enough to use different spoken languages the way that we use different computer languages.
Would we discover that like computer languages, certain languages are just better at expressing some concepts? Would we talk about love in French and about science in English or German?
Or would our easy use of language just encourage us to merge the best of all languages into some optimized hodge-podge general-use language?
