Here are a last few thoughts on the reasons to save endangered languages, the last of a series of posts.

Languages are interesting.  Each language leads to a troves of knowledge about the human brain, human behavior, and human systems of governance. It also keeps us humble – languages discovered by colonialists were dismissed as animalistic or primitive, but have been found to be intricate, complex mechanisms of expression. Can you make the South African click? How many of your relatives can be named by their relationship to you? Is there, for example, a different name for the sister of your mother than the sister of your father? Do these names reach the level of third cousins? Is there a special name for the eldest child? What is the difference between a chief and a chieftain? Why are there two different words? How many ways of making the future tense exist among the world’s languages?  (Answer: hundreds)

It develops your brain power: Research has suggested that learning to speak other languages provides mental gymnastics which refine your thinking powers.  Research also suggests that the more languages you learn, the easier it is to learn yet another.

Given humanity’s depressing failures at maintaining peace and a healthy ecology, humility should be one of our most treasured qualities.  Crystal quotes Shakespeare, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  Amen.

If knowing a second, third, or fourth language in any way diminished us, there would be a reason to support monolingualism, but the human mind is capable of mastering numerous languages.  An African student of mine said he spoke 11 languages because his father had 11 wives, each from a different tribe, and he was raised by all 11.  We don’t need to embrace polygamy to be multilingual.  All it takes is the will.

A few thousand languages are endangered.  Should we care?  The next few posts will be on this subject.

There is a certain pathos to the idea of a single speaker, master of a language nobody speaks anymore, living in a hut somewhere alone and unable to communicate.  In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond conjures up the last survivor on Easter Island, after the canoes are destroyed, the trees disappear, and everyone else has died.  Every once in a while there is a newspaper article about a lone last speaker passing away in an isolation almost beyond our ability to imagine.

According to the site ethnologue, There are 243 languages in the United States: some of which (Abnaki, Alsea, Barbareno, Iowa-Oto and many others) live only in memory as they are extinct; some (Crow, Cajun French (Louisiana Creole French is holding its own), Kansa, Kashaya and many others) are decreasing, one, Zuni, is increasing.

The names of the languages evoke a rich, colorful past which we have claimed as our own by naming things or places after the communities who spoke them: Aleut, Apache, Arapaho, Biloxi, Catawba, Cayuga, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Chickasaw, Chinook, Coeur d’Alene, and that is only the A through C’s.

There are three kinds of sign language: American Sign Language, Hawai’i Pidgin Sign Language, and Plains Indian Sign Language.

Some languages are spoken in immigrant communities, like Yiddish, various Chinese languages, Croatian, several varieties of French and German, Russian, and, of course, 28,100,000 native Spanish speakers.

I could just stop here, as this list bespeaks so much, but future posts will go into this issue farther.

Exercise:  Have each student identify one or more of his or her heritage languages, and then look them up at www.ethnologue.com.  Where are these languages spoken?  Where are they spoken in the U.S.? How many native speakers are there in the U.S. and in the world?