Language endangerment and the human value of linguistic diversity

Linguists typically celebrate the tension that plays between two realities of human linguistic knowledge, universality and diversity. But linguistic diversity is not something whose future can be taken for granted. Many local languages and cultures find themselves in great peril in this era, a fact well documented elsewhere in this collection. In the following paragraphs I will be concerned with the idea that linguistic diversity is important to human intellectual life—not only in the context of scientific linguistic inquiry, but also in relation to the class of human activities belonging to the realms of culture and art.