Dying Languages

A few weeks ago I caught this story on NPR on my drive home, about the death of the last fluent speaker of the Alaskan language Eyak. I'm always fascinated by the treatment of stories of dying languages: is it a big deal?

There are those who will argue vigorously that we must save languages from extinction because of the history and culture those languages represent, and I can understand the appeal of such an argument. We're love the idea of progress, but we don't like to think about the fact that progress always includes the end of some past situation. You don't get westward expansion without trampling over the people who were already there, or without seriously altering the lifestyles of those white Americans who traveled west. Video kills the radio star.

I'm not suggesting that the linguistic development of our culture counts as "progress": it's not that language is getting better (or worse). But I'm not convinced that the death of a language is always something to be avoided at all costs. It may have been unjust for group X to drive group Y off their homeland, and a result of that may be the loss of the Y-ish language, but to preserve the active use of Y-ish artificially, perhaps out of a sense of guilt, misses the point. I don't see what's gained by keeping a language alive for its own sake. Language is just a tool, isn't it?

Or is it? I certainly also understand the argument that language forms culture rather than merely expresses it (this is the argument made by most of the writers we've read in the first part of the semester...Pinker and Hairston being notable exceptions). But it makes me nervous as we begin to elevate language above people.

This question--whether language is a cause or effect of culture--is an important one to keep in mind as we begin our unit on historical inquiry. The ways words' meanings have changed has either affect society or reflected changes in society (or perhaps in some cases a little of both). What we decide about this is going to have a big effect on the "why this matters" part of our second essay.