Very interesting item you've posted. But, as it happens, I don't agree with the main case that's being made. It's a case of sloppy thinking.
Let me take the first sentence:
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ITHACA, N.Y.-- Languages constantly compete with one another, and the fight often can be fatal, according to researchers at Cornell University.
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This is simply not true as a general statement. In New Guinea, where there had been (and still are, as far as I'm aware) many hundreds of languages, they had been kept vigorously alive for thousands of years. Tribes, living side by side, and roughly numerically equal, kept their own languages alive even thought they were in frequent warfare. I suppose a language would die if one tribe completely wiped out another, but this seldom happens (at least until the advent of steel weapons from the west). They've learned/evolved to live in a state of tension without extinguishing one another because they need to exchange their daughters for genetic reasons.
I think one can only talk about one language competing with another -- and defeating it -- is if one culture is overwhelmingly powerful compared with another. Welsh and Gaelic are barely kept alive in the UK despite substantial expenditures of effort, money and education over the past 30 years or so.
Now to the second sentence:
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Prof. Daniel Abrams of Cornell initiated a study on how languages can be saved, or stabilized, by education and proactive policy-making.
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I doubt that this is going to be possible for all minority languages, except with great exertions in the short term. The only way minority languages could be saved is if our economic system changed completely from the present type of centralised energy and industrial systems to small-scale decentralised ones, and only then if everybody learned two languages -- a world language and their local one.
As it is, I see no hope of this. The present economic system is going to last for at least another couple of decades before great changes will be imposed on us by the demise of fossil fuels. This, I would guess, will be sufficient time for all minority languages to disappear. English or Mandarin will likely be the world language by then (probably English) and there'll be three or four more, such as Spanish and Russian (perhaps?) that might survive, although even these 'large-minority' languages might also disappear in due course if present trends were to continue for another generation or two.
It's all very sad -- but then so is our montrously centralised civilisation.
Keith Hudson
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England
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