then it is unfair to force language revitalization efforts upon them. Reasons to Support Language Revitalization Efforts Despite several legitimate reasons to allow the natural process of language death to occur, many people, especially linguistics <strong>and</strong> minority rights activists, believe that the international community must act soon to prevent the large number of endangered languages from disappearing completely. the reasons to protect endangered languages range from academic to personal, <strong>and</strong> many consider them to trump the inevitability <strong>and</strong> economic arguments given above for inaction. From the perspective of those that study language, the existence of language diversity is vital for the future of the discipline of linguistics. The prevailing theory of language over the past fifty years posits that all humans are born with a basic linguistic function, called Universal Grammar, <strong>and</strong> that the differences between languages are the results of parameters that affect which structures <strong>and</strong> forms are permitted in each language. in order to underst<strong>and</strong> what is allowed <strong>and</strong> disallowed in Universal Grammar <strong>and</strong> what the various parameters are, linguistics need to study many different languages. 69 Some languages overtly show linguistic phenomenon that have only been observed covertly in other languages, including the existence of movement <strong>and</strong> functional categories. 70 The easiest way to observe this is through phonology. English possesses about twenty-four consonant phonemes (sounds) <strong>and</strong> between fifteen <strong>and</strong> twenty vowel phonemes, depending on the dialect (note that this is not referring to letters of the alphabet, as each letter <strong>and</strong> combination of letters can have multiple phonetic realizations). If linguists only studied English, we would think that these were the only possible sounds in human language. We would never know, for example, about the click consonants that are present in the Khosian language family of Africa, or about the fifty-five additional constant phonemes present in Ubykh, a language with eighty consonants <strong>and</strong> only two vowels that was spoken in the Caucasus region of central Asia. 71 The last speaker of Ubykh passed away on 7 October 1992 in Turkey, but fortunately, linguists were able to document the language before his death. 72 As shown in this example, smaller languages are often more useful for linguistic research because they have not been fully analyzed before <strong>and</strong> because, unlike the dominant European languages, they have usually not been significantly altered through contact. To make the importance of endangered languages to linguists even more salient, one author cites this fact: if language death continues as projected, linguists will preside over the disappearance of 90% of the entities that they are meant to study, an unprecedented statistic in the history of science <strong>and</strong> human knowledge. 73 the study of the languages of the world also has benefits outside of linguistics. For historians, for example, analyzing the etymology of words <strong>and</strong> syntactic forms can reveal contact between various societies that may have occurred centuries ago; since many language communities lack formalized histories, the study of historical linguistics is one of the few ways to learn about the wars, conquests, <strong>and</strong> merging of societies over the past millennium. 74 thus, the death of a language in some cases also means the death of the language community’s history. The preservation of endangered languages also ensures that each community will continue to have their myths <strong>and</strong> stories, both for the sake of the speakers themselves <strong>and</strong> for anthropologists to be able to study them. No languages have been discovered that do not have a collection of myths <strong>and</strong> stories, even if they are not as well-known globally as the works of the great authors of the Latin, Greek, <strong>and</strong> english traditions. 75 If these works are written down, it may be possible, albeit more difficult, for 22 Melbourne Host Directorate PTY LTD | Office of Media <strong>and</strong> Design
There are over 100 sounds in human languages, many of which would be undiscovered if not for the study of small languages. 23 Melbourne Host Directorate PTY LTD | Office of Media <strong>and</strong> Design
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