We has seen the enemy and it is us: The endangered languages issue as a hopeless cause

Abstract

Linguists claim to be concerned about the endangered languages issue. In reality, nothing substantial is being done about it. There are three main reasons for this. First, linguistics as a discipline is dominated by abstract theoretical concerns in which fieldwork plays a minor part. Second, those dedicated linguists who are involved in basic documentation of endangered languages are drawn into and have their time sapped by language revitalization and linguistic social work projects. Third, linguistic Ph.D. students from non-Western developing countries have been allowed to write grammars of their own languages by introspection and thus have not been trained in field work techniques. Nor have they been encouraged to conduct basic research on other (often endangered) languages in their home countries. In sum, linguists will continue to hold conference after conference in which they decry the inexorable loss of human languages around the globe, but in fact little will be done to provide a scientific record of these languages before they die away.