John McWhorter is a tack-sharp writer who is always provocative, and rarely more so than in this piece, which argues that language death is not such a bad thing. As Lamin Sanneh and others have shown, Christian mission has been the main engine of language preservation, and I don't think that we can be quite as sanguine as McWhorter about languages dying out. Such diversity is arguably a crucial part of fulfilling the human call to "be fruitful and multiply." McWhorter mentions the Babel story dismissively as a literal depiction of the source of linguistic diversity (although it is remarkable that historical linguistics has failed to find any common source for language's wide and wild variety), but an equally important message of that story is that when "the whole earth had one language and one speech," the result was totalitarian ambition and rebellion against the divine mandate to fill the earth (with all the cultural diversity that would entail). Still, well worth reading.

re: cultural worlds, globalization, language

Andy:

At the end of the day, language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. Globalization means hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space. For them to do so and still maintain distinct languages across generations happens only amidst unusually tenacious self-isolation—such as that of the Amish—or brutal segregation. (Jews did not speak Yiddish in order to revel in their diversity but because they lived in an apartheid society.) Crucially, it is black Americans, the Americans whose English is most distinct from that of the mainstream, who are the ones most likely to live separately from whites geographically and spiritually.

The alternative, it would seem, is indigenous groups left to live in isolation—complete with the maltreatment of women and lack of access to modern medicine and technology typical of such societies. Few could countenance this as morally justified, and attempts to find some happy medium in such cases are frustrated by the simple fact that such peoples, upon exposure to the West, tend to seek membership in it.

As we assess our linguistic future as a species, a basic question remains. Would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages but one?