Virtually every endangered language is endangered because its community was systematically targeted by genocide, forced cultural assimilation, some kind of political marginalization. On a practical level, language diversity encodes the sum of human cultural, historical and ecological knowledge. As a species, we lose knowledge when we lose

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In a world in which any skill that can't be leveraged for the maximum benefit of capitalism is seen as a dubious enterprise, it can be difficult to make the case for languages that are not widely spoken. Yet their continued existence matters, for a variety of compelling reasons. "First of all, it's just the right thing to do," says Daniel Bögre... See more