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25
out of twenty native Alaskan languages,
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Although language extinction is sad for the people involved, why should the rest of
us care? What effect will other people's language loss have on the future of people who
(A):
speak English, for example? Replacing a minor language with a more widespread
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124) = permit
.
20 one may even seem like a good thing, allowing people to communicate with each other
more easily. But language diversity is as important as biological diversity.
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hot all
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Andrew Woodfield, director of the Centre for Theories of Language and Learning 1-14
in Bristol, England, suggested in a 1995 seminar on language conservation that people
do not yet know all the ways in which linguistic diversity is important. "The fact is, no
one knows exactly what riches are hidden inside the less-studied languages," he says.
Woodfield compares one argument for conserving unstudied endangered plants -
that they may be medically valuable with the argument for conserving endangered
languages. We have inductive evidence based on past studies of well-known danguages
that there will be riches, even though we do not know what they will be
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It seems
(B)
30 paradoxical but it's true. By allowing.languages to die out, the human race is destroying
ไพฟ
4714
things doesn't understand," he argues.
(243)
Stephen Wurm, in his introduction to the Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
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