Destructivism: the death of languages
The BBC News Magazine (always a good source of language stories) has a feature on dying languages this week. It's a good read that starts to raise questions about the links between language, culture and identity. For example, when a language dies, does part of human culture go with it? Or should we just treat the death of an obscure language as an inevitable and unlamented consequence of progress?Given the rise of English (or Globish...or ELF) around the world, it's a process that will occur more and more frequently as time goes by.
