Dying Languages

ker of a major language: the bigger the better, and English best of all. Not because English is intrinsically superior, but because so many people and so many cultures speak it. If you’re one of the last speakers of Hixkaryana (a Brazilian language that reverses sentence order to put the object first and the subject last, apparently) then the conversations would tend, I would imagine, to be fairly limited. “Caught any fish today?” Or rather “Fish today, any caught?” (Or, “White men with tape recorder today, any seen?”, except they won’t have a word for “tape recorder”.) Basically it’s moribund. English, on the contrary, is thriving, constantly growing and changing, and the wonderful thing is, it’s all available to us. We understand and appreciate US writers, Australian writers, Anglophone Indian writers, and it’s pure gain: we don’t at the same time lose our appreciation of English culture. On the contrary we’re now better able to judge and appreciate it.

So yes, I’m all for the preservation of dying languages in theory: how can you possibly disapprove? But I’m very glad it’s not me who’s one of the few remaining speakers.