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Endangered Languages and Languages in Danger: Issues of documentation, policy, and language rights
Edited by Luna Filipović and Martin Pütz
[IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society 42] 2016
► pp. 115–143

A cost-and-benefit approach to language loss

| University of Chicago

The linguistics discourse on language endangerment and loss has been marked by a number of disputable assumptions about what languages are and about the terrible price humanity incurs in losing linguistic and cultural diversity as some of them die. I dispute some of those assumptions, including the claim that there are language rights. I also raise issues about the notions heritage and ancestral languages, which should not be confused with mother tongue. I argue that language loss is a consequence of the communicative habits of speakers, influenced in the here and now by their particular socioeconomic ecologies. The notion of population structure, which has to do with whether a population is integrated or segregated, who gets to interact regularly with whom, and who has to accommodate whom linguistically, plays an important role in my arguments.

Keywords: adaptation, benefit, colonization, ecology, globalization, heritage language, language rights, population structure
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 3 October 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.42.06muf
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