Saturday, September 22, 2007

Why?

Why am I challenging the conventional wisdom on language death (i.e., that it’s bad)?


Because, I believe linguists need to analyze the relationship between language death and natural language evolution dispassionately. The cause of my posts on this topic was the recognition that conventional wisdom within linguistics seemed to hold that contemporary language death is somehow threatening the structure of language and culture, and I’m not convinced that’s true.

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