Preserving languages preserves cultural identities

The argument

Languages contain a wealth of cultural knowledge that exists nowhere else. Languages have unique oral histories, performance art, and ways of communicating. They also contain unique figures of speech, inspiring idioms, and amusing vocabulary, each of which developed inside one community's experience. Languages are aesthetically valuable, and the reason that value cannot simply be transferred is that direct translations between languages always lose the essence of the originating language's meaning. What a phrase does in its own tongue — what it implies, what makes it funny, what it assumes the listener already knows — is not fully recoverable in another. When a language stops being spoken, that content is not relocated; it ends. That is why endangered languages should be preserved, so people can access and enjoy their language rather than meet it only in translation. And the argument is not made on their behalf from outside: speakers of endangered languages work to revive their language for many reasons of their own, including cultural connection. Two cases show what that work looks like. Members of the Cherokee tribe in the Eastern Band worked together to create a language immersion school for children, where classes, including science and math, are taught in Cherokee — an arrangement that treats the language as the medium for everything rather than as one subject among others. By the 1960s, the Miami language spoken by the Miami Tribe in the U.S. Midwest was extinct, but thanks to work by Miami speakers, the language is taught at Miami University in Ohio, which shows that even an interruption that severe need not be final. In both cases the motive is the same: members of such people groups with an endangered language want to know their cultural heritage, so they take great lengths to revive the language that holds it.

Context

There is a sense of loss and sadness when the last speaker of an endangered language dies. Language means more to people than just a means of communication—it is a bridge to a cultural heritage that may stretch back thousands of years, as was the case when Boa Sr, the last native speaker of the Bo language spoken on the Andaman Islands, died in 2010. With her death, linguists mourned the loss of a person, as well as the loss of a culture.

Premises

Counter-arguments

People's languages are important, but content in languages can still be translated to majority languages. Languages do not shape worldview or cultural identity; people shape cultural identity. Language preservation is not necessary for cultural preservation because though a language may die with the last speaker, a culture can still live on through other documentation. In addition, people groups may choose to have their cultural connection die out in favor of a new cultural affiliation. Their choice should be respected.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Just because all cultural identities are valuable does not mean they need to be preserved forever.