Language maintenance and language shift: preservation versus extinction

Abstract

Languages are dying out, without being replaced, at an increasingly catastrophic rate. Languages are being lost as a result of language shift and language murder. Already the most populous 100 languages of the world account for 95% of the world's population. There are good reasons for linguists to publicise this loss of linguistic diversity and to attempt to stem the tide as much as they are able. For example, linguists should be prepared to argue publicly that barriers to communication can be a good thing, that bilingualism is normal, and that all languages are complex and adequate systems of communication.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.