Language is identity! Would you like to tell those People that it is not bad 
when they lose their language. As I mentioned, I am a member of a linguistic 
minority, too, and I would feel like my human rights where taken if someone 
tells me I should learn another language because mine is not so much worth. 
Language is culture and is human right, everybody has the right for his 
language. 

What is your mother tongue? If it is English it is easy for you to tell the 
world to give up their languages in favor of English.
And besides, supporting minor languages mostly always supports bi- or 
trilinguism because you speak the majority and minorty language(s). 
Multilinguism is very beneficial for children. They can learn much easier new 
languages when they have two mother tongues. And in a world where multilinguism 
is getting more important this might be a real useful side effect. 

And what do you mean by “have so little information stored in them”? Just 
because they are not as far developped as the main languages doesn’t mean they 
carry zero information. In America there are Indian languages that have more 
names for the flowers in their environment and whether they are toxic or not 
than the biologist can’t give latin names for them. As language minorities 
mostly live in rural areas they are perfectly adapted to their environment and 
in their linguistic world/lexicon there are more concepts and ideas than people 
from the cities have. It’s big culture goods we can’t risk to lose. 


Von: geni
Gesendet: ‎18‎. ‎Februar‎ ‎2013 ‎22‎:‎58
An: Wikimedia Mailing List
Betreff: Re: [Wikimedia-l] New proposal for a wiki Project!



On 18 February 2013 16:33, Kevin Behrens <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I have started a proposal for a new wiki project: WikiLang 
> (meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiLang). It is about endangered languages and 
> >language documentation/decipherment. It is a very important step in order to 
> save our linguistic diversity which is ongoing faster than >the extinction of 
> animals.

Why? Most of the languages in question have so little information
stored in them that even if we assume a total loss of that information
(which is unlikely) that downside will be massively outweighed by the
upside of easier communication between people.

-- 
geni

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