2.2.1 Social Justice

Language loss is often not voluntary; it frequently involves violations of human rights, pushed by repression, oppression, prejudice, violence, and at times by ethnic cleansing and genocide. We should care because it is a matter of right and wrong.

Even at less violent extremes, language loss is typically experienced as a crisis of social identity. For many communities, work towards language revitalization is part of a “larger effort to restore personal and societal wellness” (Pfeiffer & Holm, 1994, p. 35). Some scholars and community activists insist that language shift leads to damaged communities and dysfunctional behaviors. They argue that one’s psychological, social, and physical wellbeing is connected with one’s native language; it shapes one’s values, self-image, identity, relationships, and ultimately success in life. Numerous indigenous voices represented in the literature testify to the role of language in their cultural and personal identity, and to the impact of language endangerment on that identity.

The UNESCO Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, for example, establish the linguistics rights of native peoples. Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson (1995) surveys ways to combat linguistic discrimination, and Skutnabb-Kangas (2000) addresses various areas of linguistic rights including policy formation, the inherent value of language, identity, education, and globalization.

2.2.2 Human Concerns

Languages are the treasure houses of information for history, literature, philosophy, and art. Their stories, ideas, and words help us make sense of our own lives and of the world around us—of the human experience, of the human condition in general. When a language goes extinct without documentation, we lose incalculable amounts of human knowledge. To illustrate, we mention just two areas, literature and history.

Literature. The life-enriching value of literature is well understood: “by studying literature, we learn what it means to be human.” (CliffsNotes, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, MA). Moreover, literature is not confined to written texts; all cultures have oral literature. People everywhere have grappled with the complexities of their world and the problems of life, and their insights and discoveries, which are represented in their literatures, oral or written, are of value to us all. When a language becomes extinct without documentation, taking all its oral literature, oral tradition, and oral history into oblivion, all of humanity is diminished.

History. We study history “to gain access to the laboratory of human experience” (American History Association, Washington, DC). Great reservoirs of historical information are recovered from the investigation of languages. Historical linguistics and language classification tell us how languages are related and give us history of human groups, information about how they are related, their contacts and migrations, their homeland and past culture. All this information and other insights into shared human experiences are irretrievably lost when a language is lost without adequate documentation.

Because languages contain or reflect the world’s knowledge and wisdom, the loss of literature and historical information means loss in the range of potential ways of experiencing and understanding the world.

2.2.3 Loss of Knowledge

The reservoir of linguistic diversity constitutes one of the greatest treasures of humanity. This means that the loss of the hundreds of languages that have already disappeared is a monumental intellectual catastrophe on many levels. For example, each language encodes knowledge about the natural and cultural world it is used in, knowledge often unknown outside of the small speech communities where the majority of endangered languages are spoken. When a language dies without adequate documentation, it takes with it this irreplaceable knowledge. Loss of such knowledge could have devastating consequences, it is argued, because it can relate to humankind’s very survival. Reduction of language diversity diminishes the adaptational strength of the human species because it lowers the pool of knowledge from which we can draw.

The Seri (of Sonora, Mexico, with only 700 speakers) provide a compelling example. The Seri have knowledge of “eelgrass” (Zostera marina L.), with a whole set of vocabulary dealing with eelgrass and its use, for example xnois “eelgrass seed.” It is “the only known grain from the sea used as a human food source . . . eelgrass has considerable potential as a general food source . . . Its cultivation would not require fresh water, pesticides, or artificial fertilizer” (Felger & Moser, 1973, pp. 355–356). As the argument goes, it is plausible to speculate about a future in which some natural or human-caused disaster might compromise land-based crops, leaving human survival in jeopardy because of the loss of knowledge of alternative food sources, such as the knowledge of eelgrass reflected in Seri. Speculation aside, it is clear that documentation of the languages of small-scale societies and of the knowledge reflected in their languages has significantly benefitted humanity.

Medicine offers other examples. It is often claimed that 75% of plant-derived pharmaceuticals were discovered from examining traditional medicines, where the language of curers often played a key role (see, for example, Bierer, Carlson, & King, 1996). If these languages had become extinct and knowledge of the medicinal plants been lost, all of humanity would be impoverished and human survival would be less secure. To cite just one example, Paul Cox, working with Epenesa Mauigoa, a taulasea (traditional healer), on Upolu, Samoa, described 121 herbal remedies, including knowledge of the mamala plant (Homalanthus nutans) and the anti-viral drug prostratin, used to treat yellow fever. In trials at the National Cancer Institute, it proved effective against HIV Type 1 (Cox, 1993, 2001). Loss of this traditional Samoan knowledge would have been a loss for all of humanity.

So goes the argument that reduction of language diversity diminishes the adaptive strength of humans as a species because it lowers the pool of knowledge from which we can draw for survival. Of course, in principle it would be possible for a society to give up its language, shift to another, and find ways to talk about traditional knowledge in the new language. However, in case after case, when a language was not passed on to the next generation, the knowledge of the natural and cultural world encoded in that language failed to be transmitted as well.

2.2.4 Scientific Understanding of Language

A central goal of linguistics is the understanding of human cognition and human language capacity through the study of what is possible and impossible in human languages. Discovery of previously unknown linguistic features and traits in undescribed languages contributes to achieving this goal and advances knowledge of how the human mind works. Language extinction is an unspeakable disaster, impeding achievement of this goal. The following example illustrates this.

The discovery of the existence of languages with OVS (object-verb-subject) and OSV (object-subject-verb) basic word orders forced abandonment of a previously postulated language universal. Greenberg (1978, p. 2) proposed that “whenever the object precedes the verb, the subject does likewise.” However, a number of languages with OVS and OSV basic word order have been discovered, most of them spoken in small communities in the Amazon.

Discovery of languages with these possible basic word orders not only forced abandonment of the postulated universal, it required revision of numerous other theoretical claims about language. It is all too plausible, given what has happened to indigenous languages at the hands of unscrupulous loggers, miners, and ranchers in Brazil, that the few languages with these word orders could have become extinct before they were documented, leaving us forever with erroneous assumptions about what is possible and impossible in human language and how that reflects human cognition.

Documentation of endangered languages has frequently demonstrated the importance of obtaining adequate descriptions of these languages. This is illustrated, for example, by recent documentation of Nivaclé, a language of Argentina and Paraguay with about 8,800 speakers, where a hitherto unknown speech sound was discovered: /͡kl/, similar to a “k” and “l” pronounced together and released simultaneously. The discovery of a previously unknown linguistic trait is significant for learning the full range of what is possible in human language, but this case has even broader significance. The new Nivaclé sound has implications for general claims about language. The Nivaclé sound system has, in addition to /͡kl/, also a voiceless “l,” but has no plain “l.” This violates several proposed generalizations about laterals and liquids in human languages (Maddieson, 1984, p. 88). One claim is that “a language with two or more liquids is expected to have a lateral / non-lateral contrast between them”—basically this means that a language with more than one liquid is expected to have both “l”-like and “r”-like sounds. However, in Nivaclé both liquids, /͡kl/and voiceless “l,” are laterals (“l” sounds), and there are no non-lateral liquids (no “r” sounds). (For this and other implications of Nivaclé laterals for language universals, see Palosaari & Campbell, 2011.) This example shows how the discovery of a new speech sound in threatened languages can have implications for theoretical claims about language.

In examples, Oro Win (Chapakuran, with five speakers) has a speech sound that is a voiceless laminal dental stop, followed by bilabial trill (Ladefoged & Everett, 1996). Pirahã (Muran, 300 speakers) has a voiced bilabial trill (rare) and a lateral-apical double-flap (unique) (Everett, 1984). Pirahã, with only 11 consonants, and Oro Win, with only 12, have some of the smallest consonant inventories in the world, and yet they have very complex, unique speech sounds. These complex sounds are counterexamples to Lindblom and Maddieson’s (1988) “size principle,” which claims that smaller inventories of consonants tend to contain only consonants that are simpler (to produce or to perceive) and that more complex consonants are found in languages with larger consonant inventories.

In all three of these cases, the language involved could easily have become extinct before being documented, given social and political trends affecting these communities. This would have left linguists with no inkling that such traits are possible in human languages. Linguists document endangered languages to discover information of this sort, to determine the full range of what is possible in human languages.

2.2.5 Peace through Loss of Languages?

Finally, we turn to an erroneous view that needs rectification—the equation of language loss with increased understanding and fostering world peace. It is often asserted that if we had fewer languages, we would understand each other better and live in greater harmony. But monolingualism is no guarantee of “understanding,” as attested by the bloody conflicts of recent times in monolingual Northern Ireland, Syria, or the former Yugoslavia, where Serbs and Croats have a common language; the 1994 genocide in Rwanda involved Hutu and Tutsi, both speakers of the same language, Kinyarwanda. This contrasts with relatively peaceful and officially multilingual countries like Belgium, Canada, Finland, Switzerland, and Tanzania. Multilingual and multi-cultural countries need to understand that national unity and understanding are not fostered by monolingualism or ethnic cleansing, but that recognition of minority languages rights may be the best way of bringing about mutual trust, peace, and ultimately, national unity. We need to expose the erroneous assumption that people and countries cannot be both multilingual and successful, and show, rather, that there are significant benefits from multilingualism.