Read a few news headlines and you'll see some common themes: the rising number of languages dying worldwide, the isolation of individual last speakers, and the wider cultural loss for humanity. These stories often mention how people try to protect such languages. However, they tend to focus less on how such efforts actually help speakers of endangered languages. Such efforts sometimes help, sometimes harm, and sometimes do both.
Encouraging someone to keep speaking a declining minority language could certainly boost his or her sense of identity. But when a bigger language is adopted somewhere, it doesn't remove everything that came before. Often, intense contact between big and small languages leads to a new mixture - for example, Sheng in Kenya and Tsotsitaal in South Africa. In other cases, such language contact results in a new localized dialect. As linguist Peter Trudgill argues, this can also hold a highly local identity.
Sure enough, enabling a people to use their traditional language can make them feel better about themselves. But is it really helping them? Simply adding your ancestral language as a new school subject isn't very helpful if your school is falling down, or you're not eating well. To think anything much can be solved just by performing CPR (心肺复苏) in a minority language is to ignore how complicated human society is and how many different simultaneous (同时的) needs we have.
In Québec, Canada, just under 75% of residents have French as their native language, but the percentage has fallen over the past five years. In 2022, the Québec Legislature passed Bill 96, which requires people to only use French for official speech and writing. This is an example of the prioritization of language, yet it's unclear whether the law will actually improve Québec residents' lives, or even help preserve French in Québec.
So promoting endangered languages can be a positive force, but we shouldn't assume that's universally true. It is especially difficult for a language expert to say so. Perhaps we should focus less on languages themselves, and pay more attention to the lives of the people who speak them.
