Maybe you saw that article in the New Yorker over the summer which claimed that it’s ok for a language to die. If you didn’t, save yourself the click. I’m not going to critique it here because there is an excellent reply from the Endangered Languages Project, which I encourage you to read.
The authors stress in the first part of the reply that the discourse around dying languages needs to change. They write:
Discourses and narratives – the stories we tell about things, and the ways we tell them – are not harmless or abstract. They do things, and have concrete effects. For centuries, narratives about Indigenous Peoples and our languages have been shaped by those working to eliminate us, to eradicate our ways of knowing, being, living, and speaking. Dominant, hegemonic narratives about us have been crafted to support very real efforts to make us disappear: our cultures dismissed as “savage” or “primitive” to justify taking our children from us; our languages denigrated as “gibberish” incapable of holding “higher, rational thought,” and thus forbidden in courtrooms and classrooms – and violently beaten out of our children.
The New Yorker article really shouldn’t have seen print. I mean, how hard would it be to factcheck the stuff in there? And why are we taking linguistics articles from a philosopher? There are whole language departments at colleges just full of linguists! How hard would it be to find the Endangered Languages Project and send them an email. They’re not hiding!
Fortunately, the authors of the reply are also not fucking around:
What these discourses do, what this [New Yorker article] does, put plainly, is reproduce the logic and discourses of colonial genocide.
The full reply is outstanding and you should go read it. It will help you understand language (and power) in a better way. And maybe the next time you see a publication like the New Yorker throw some garbage like that your way, you’ll send them a message.