Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

78 Language Planning and Education
This is valuable not just because sustainable development is more likely where
indigenous knowledge systems are utilised but because it adds to the total sum of
human knowledge, making a contribution thence to human welfare by aiding, for
example, the discovery of new medicines.
Also lost, Crystal (2000: 40) argues, are the histories of which languages are
repositories, along with the worldviews they embody, and without these we are less
capable of adapting and enriching our own. Diversity, he reminds us (2000: 33) is
more propitious in evolutionary terms to the long-term survival of the species than
uniformity. The strongest natural systems are those which are diverse. Combined
here, then, are ecological arguments, suggesting that the reasons for preserving
endangered languages are akin to those for protecting threatened species, and arguments
from scientific advantage.
To these may be added arguments based on the intrinsic and aesthetic value of
linguistic diversity. Particular languages, it is sometimes said (see Weinstock 2003:
254), are intrinsically valuable, independent of the utility they may have, because
they represent unique human accomplishments, a singular way of conceptualising
the world. They are, therefore, ends in themselves, and when a language is lost,
something of intrinsic value goes with it.
Similar views are advanced by Crystal (2000: 54), who argues that linguistic
diversity is worth protecting because ‘languages are interesting in themselves’,
because in their variety they can tell us more about the nature of language and the
human language faculty. An example would be the system of evidentiality, not found
in most Western languages, but encoded in the grammar of the verb phrase in the
Tuyuca language, where different verb forms signal different kinds of evidence for a
proposition (Crystal 2000: 59).
Diversity, finally, confers broad aesthetic benefits; it just makes the world a more
colourful, more stimulating place, affording more cultural choice and more resources
for artistic expression.
4.2.1.2 Identity arguments
The initial premise here, now a commonplace, is that language is not just an
instrument for communication but also – often – an important, even constitutive,
feature of a community’s identity. This being so, the loss of a language may do serious
harm to the community’s identity and culture, a viewpoint strongly articulated by
Fishman, who proclaims that: ‘the destruction of a language is the destruction of a
rooted identity’ (1991: 4).
For postmodernists, holding a view of identity as contingent, fluid, constructed,
this particular claim will seem displeasingly essentialist (May 2001: 308). Fishman’s
overall position is subtler, however. He concedes that an ethnie’s culture and identity
may ‘long outlast language maintenance’ (1991: 17), just as an Irish identity has
outlasted the decline of Irish as a language of regular spoken communication, or a
Tlingit identity the loss of the Tlingit language (Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1998:
73), but insists that the culture and identity that endures is nonetheless changed.