4. A final – and, in my view, the most effective – line
of argument appeals to the nation's broader interest in social justice.
We should care about preventing the extinction of languages because of
the human costs to those most directly affected. "The destruction
of a language is the destruction of a rooted identity" (Fishman, 1991,
p. 4) for both groups and individuals. Along with the accompanying loss
of culture, language loss can destroy a sense of self-worth, limiting human
potential and complicating efforts to solve other problems, such as poverty,
family breakdown, school failure, and substance abuse. After all, language
death does not happen in privileged communities. It happens to the dispossessed
and the disempowered, peoples who most need their cultural resources to
survive.
In this context, indigenous language renewal takes on
an added significance. It becomes something of value not merely to academic
researchers, but to native speakers themselves. This is true even in extreme
cases where a language seems beyond repair. As one linguist sums up a project
to revive Adnyamathanha, an Australian Aboriginal tongue that had declined
to about 20 native speakers:
It was not the success in reviving the language – although
in some small ways [the program] did that. It was success in reviving something
far deeper than the language itself – that sense of worth in being Adnyamathanha,
and in having something unique and infinitely worth hanging onto. [D. Tunbridge,
quoted in Schmidt, 1990, p. 106.]
