People choose not to speak a dying language

The argument

Speakers of endangered languages have a choice to maintain their language, and this position holds that the choice belongs to them rather than to anybody else. Sometimes immigrant parents decide not to teach their children a heritage language because they think it will hinder their children's chances for success in their new country. Whether or not an outside observer would make the same decision, it is a parent's choice to decide what language they wish to raise their child in — and the same principle scales up. In general, it is a people group's choice of whether or not they wish to pass their language and culture to the next generation. The difficulty with preservation campaigns is who is making the case. Linguists and language-enthusiasts want to maintain a language for "cultural heritage" or "preservation of knowledge," but ultimately, the language at risk is not these researchers' language. The costs of maintaining it — the schooling, the daily effort, the possible disadvantage to a child's prospects — fall on the community, while the benefit the researchers describe accrues to a field of study. That asymmetry makes external advocacy a weak basis on which to settle the question. It is a weak basis practically as well as ethically. For successful preservation of an endangered language, the preservation process needs to have community support outside of academics or linguists, because a language survives by being spoken rather than by being recorded. If the community chooses not to participate in that process, it is this community's right to do so, and no amount of outside commitment can substitute for the participation that is missing. Outside researchers should not interfere with the minority language's shift to the majority language.

Context

For some speakers of minority languages (such as Spanish-speaking people in the U.S. or Tibetan-speaking people in China), learning the majority language (English and Mandarin respectively) means gaining more access to education, work opportunities, and socioeconomic advancement. Majority languages signify and promote progress while minority, endangered languages are hindrances to progress and collaboration.

Premises

Counter-arguments

It is not always a people group's choice to stop speaking their language as assimilating to the majority language is often out of political or economic necessity. For example, the U.S. has a strong, monolingual English culture; society pressures and expects immigrants to speak English. In the late 19th and 20th centuries, the U.S. government built Native American boarding schools where Native American children were forcefully assimilated into European-American culture. Speaking their native language was disallowed. Today, many indigenous North American languages are endangered or extinct. The depleted number of Indigenous North American languages is an example of how a ruling government suppressed a people's group's language through forced assimilation. Parents may choose to raise their children in the majority language and not teach the minority language. Yet, children may grow up and feel a loss of cultural connection or a missed opportunity in not learning their heritage language. Just because the parents do not find the minority/endangered language valuable does not mean the language itself does not have value to their children.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Though a speaker's choice to stop speaking their mother tongue is valid, this does not mean their choice will not affect future generations' cultural connection to the language or their desire to know the endangered language.