The stakes: Linguistic diversity, linguistic human rights and mothertonguebased multilingual education or linguistic genocide, crimes against humanity and an even faster destruction of biodiversity and our planet
Much work by sociolinguists and educationists on linguistic diversity and endangered languages is descriptive. It often stops at asking 'what? questions and some 'how? questions. This gives too little prominence to a focus on analysing 'why? questions) and, especially, on trying to change the economic, techno military, social and ideological circumstances that lead to language endangerment and disappearance of linguistic diversity in the first place (Skutnabb Kangas 2000) Documenting endangered languages is often necessary and always positive, but it should be secondary to a holistic/ecological analysis, and change. I start with some definitions of concepts that I use in this introductory section. Building on Christina Bratt Paulston (1994) and others, we can put together adjectives used about endangered or extinct languages "dead" "dying" and "neglected" with nouns describing what is needed for those languages if one wants them to be "alive" and continue to be maintained and developed. When a language is "dead" it needs revival; when it is "dying" it needs reversal, and when it is "neglected" it needs revitalisation.