Should we really care about any of this? Abley thinks we should and I agree. The loss of a language is also the loss of a different way of seeing the world, a different way of conceptualizing facts or events, and a different way of telling the human story. Anyone who has made the effort to become fluent in a second or third language will know that in order to speak that language, you have to learn to think in that language - to think differently from one's usual habits.
This forces one to look at and think about the world differently as well. The relevance of this to the current situation is especially important because the languages that are dying out are, unfortunately, languages that the most different from those which dominate today:
- "We will lose languages that are astonishingly unlike any widespread tongue. Languages employ sounds and organize the mental world in ways that are natural to their speakers but can seem downright weird to other people. ... [T]ake Kakardian, also known as Circassian, which arises from that great hotbed of linguistic diversity, the Caucausus Mountains. It boats forty-eight consonants - more than double the number in English - but two vowels at most. In linguistic circles, a few experts have doubted those vowels' existence... To speak Ubykh...you'd need to get your tongue around eighty-one consonants."
Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages
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