I’ve got numerous sub-Reddits that I love including one called Change My View (r/changemyview) where people pose their positions on sensitive (and not-so-sensitive) topics and ask others to try to convince them to change their mind.
And unlike debate on 99% of the Internet, the respondents are often successful in changing the view of the original poster!
A recent questions was one that, as someone with an interest with language and society, I had wondered myself – is there real value in preserving dying languages that are only spoken by a few hundred (or a few dozen) people?
On one hand, there seems to be something tragic about losing any part of any culture including language. There’s the fact that languages are how we understand the world and there are numerous examples of different languages having words that capture unique concepts which often reflect the nature of the people who coin those terms.
On the other hand, you might point to the enormous communication benefits gained by having only a handful of core languages (with English being dominant) around the world and that languages, in many ways, mirror the rise and fall of animal species in the natural world – eg. “only the strong survive”.
Anyhow, I didn’t have a strong opinion either way but tended to lean towards dying languages not being worth saving (although *archiving* is something different in my mind) but the conversation in that thread, as usual, gave me much to think about on both sides of the issue.