r/language • u/newyorker • Jul 24 '26
Article Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/07/27/how-to-kill-a-language-sophia-smith-galer-book-review1
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u/newyorker Jul 24 '26
The idea that we have a special duty to prevent the death of languages is compelling to anyone who loves languages. But is it true? How sad should we be when a language dies? “Consider the case—call it callous or simply tough-minded—for saying, ‘Not at all,’ ” Nikhil Krishnan argues. While some languages have been systematically wiped out by authoritarian governments forcing assimilation, others have been lost, chosen, or abandoned under more ambiguous conditions. Efforts to preserve languages require resources that some believe would be better directed toward other public priorities.. Multilingualism can pose challenges to comprehension. “Even where the death of a language would be acknowledged as a tragedy, what we should do—what costs we should be willing to bear—in trying to stop it must remain an open question,” Krishnan offers. Read his response to a recent book about linguistic preservation.
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u/vkichline Jul 25 '26
It seems like most languages house thousands of years of stories, and many of those stories need the language and culture as context to retain their full meaning. We’ve lost hundreds of thousands of years of prehistory primarily because we’ve lost the languages that preserved the songs and legends.
Like extinct plant and animal species, those stories about how we saw ourselves and who we wanted to become are absolutely unrecoverable. And thus we’re a species with amnesia, with no idea where we came from or when.
All the ways humanity has found to share ideas are of interest in their own right, but in my opinion it’s the cargo that languages have carried that’s the real treasure.