When languages die

The death of a language is more than the death of a language -- it is the death of a way of life of peoples, the death of cultural lineage going back to thousands of years, the death of one more way of looking at the world. Languages are not merely tools we use to communicate with, they are the physical imprint of our collective culture, vocalized and/or written.

The death of any language is to be mourned, to be cried over, for not only have we lost a way of looking at the world, but we have also lost a way of understanding the world -- something that might be impossible through existing languages. There are languages not in the Indo-European family that classify things not by their structure, but by their shape: a round table is just as much a table to us as a regular rectangular table is. For speakers of those languages, it is preposterous, illogical to say that these things are the same.

Our languages reflect how we categorize things. When we lose our language, we lose our way of categorizing things-- we forget that there are alternate ways of looking at the same old structure. The Indo-Eurpean linguistic family -- that comprises from Nepali to Hindi to English to Spanish to Latin to Italian and Greek, for all its diversities, has a rather similar way of looking things. Newari is a hybrid -- it's dying. Languages of the North -- the different dialects of Gurung and Tamang languages are different...they're Tibeto-Burmese families, and they're dying much faster. Someone I know would rather be a Brooklyn hipster than live with the 'baggage' of language, culture and the way of life. They're not my languages, and their culture is not mine. In the farce of the American democracy, we're losing the true democracy of thinking differently in our languages. I weep for languages that are not mine, and cultures that are not mine, that will certainly be on their deathbeds within my generation. These are sad days.

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