How to Cope With Language Death

Write 'em down, let 'em go.

There's a lot of Wikistuff about language death. Go wiki it. (Someone put me in a stockade for my awful use of that word.) Attached are terms like "killer language", "language murder" and the laughably linguistics-scholarly "linguicide". I don't buy it. Hold on before we go any further: I am vehemently opposed to "English only" and like laws, but I do think that if we are going to make any judgments on the big E then we must also do the same to its colonial imperialist-dog killer language friends, which according to Wikipedia are Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, French, Hindi, Swedish, and Hausa. So, if you hate on English, you hate on Hausa. How could anyone hate on Hausa? It's like kicking a puppy.

People learn language mostly out of a) necessity or b) expectations or social norms or c) difficult to identify internal motivations. Note that a) is so much more important than any other possible reason. This is from personal experience, but I'm sure if you Google Scholared "motivation language acquisition", you'd find some real evidence. Languages die when people are no longer motivated to speak them. In those situations, it's usually best to do the same as when any other organism is dead: plan a funeral.

In this case, the undertakers of languages are usually dressed in tweed rather than black--they're the professors of strange ilk to be found in campuses across the world, and they wield the tape recorder to the great effect of saving what can be remembered of the formerly living form of communication. Let them do their thing. Artificially resuscitating linguistic patterns is likely to be more effective than doing the same to organisms, but is far less fulfilling, as what you usually get is less a living language and more an "undead" one, unfaithful to the original and inaccessible to whichever native populations still exist.

The Rosetta Project is the largest time capsule for the dead and dying. Check out their space-aged language recording project here.

In the meantime, don't freak out that Washo is done for.