I love the counter-cultural tone of John McWhorter's short musing on how linguists deal with the topic of the disappearence of languages. (I don't know enough about the New York Sun to speculate on why it would appear in that rag.) The assumption that the great die-off will lead to something like a utopian sharing of one great, global language seems to do two things at once. It introduces (and is based on) a deep misunderstanding of the dynamic nature of language adoption and language change within human populations across many generations; and it imagines that because of the historical accident of English's dominance that English (rather than, say, Chinese or Spanish) will be the mythical lingua franca.
Those things aside, it's a lovely fairy tale, and one that strikes a bright note among the doom-and-gloom, Chicken Little crowd that loves nothing so much as a gruesome tale about a language murdered by Capital, Globalism, and English.
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