Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM)

of languages is a sign of Allah’s work on earth, and
for the Acoma tribe of New Mexico in the United
States, the mother goddess Iatiku created so many
languages to prevent the peoples of the world from
quarreling. 64 thus, the religious arguments for noninterference
in language endangerment are mainly
found in Christianity.
Another set of arguments against action to protect
Some argue that for religious reasons the international community
should not spend its resources on language revitalization.
endangered languages is that the endangerment and
death of the vast majority of the world’s languages are
inevitable, regardless of any efforts the international
community may take now, so it would be a waste
of time, energy, and resources to try to do anything
about it. Some people believe that, as the current
trend is showing, multilingualism is just a temporary
stage on the way to complete monolingualism and
that all speakers will eventually settle on the single
most useful language. Because globalization and
urbanization are constantly limiting the number of
“useful” languages left in the world, these forces
will inevitably lead to the elimination of most of the
world’s languages. Any attempts to reverse this
trend would be futile in the long term. 65 A second
line of related reasoning concerns the ability of
individuals to learn their indigenous language. Given
the complicated syntax and morphology of many
of these languages, and the differences between
them and the dominant languages, some think that
it would be extremely difficult or impossible to teach
the younger generations, who often have had no
previous exposure, to speak the languages. 66 these
two arguments against protecting endangered
languages suggest that any efforts to revive such
languages are doomed to fail from the start.
A third, and perhaps the most common, set of
arguments against protecting endangered languages
rests on an economic rationale. The first economic
argument is that it is not cost-effective to try to protect
endangered languages. Even if it were possible to
revive endangered languages, both private and
public organizations do not have the monetary or
physical resources to accommodate educational
administrative systems and other services in all of
these languages. Approximately 40% of the entire
administrative budget of the European Union goes
toward translation, 67 and the official recognition of
all indigenous languages in countries like Papua New
Guinea and Nigeria, with hundreds of languages each,
would be crippling for the states’ budgets. The second
argument in this category is that the decay of most
minority languages occurs because speakers actively
choose to abandon their mother tongue in the hope
of opportunities for socioeconomic advancement.
After a careful cost-benefit analysis over switching
to a dominant language, many indigenous language
speakers decide that the economic benefits of
utilizing the dominant language outweigh the cultural
legacy of the mother tongue. For this reason, many
minority parents oppose education programs that
attempt to incorporate the indigenous language into
their children’s curriculum, as they want their children
to obtain full fluency in the dominant language. 68 if
many minority language speakers actively choose to
abandon their mother tongue and oppose programs
to reverse language endangerment, so many believe,
21
Melbourne Host Directorate PTY LTD | Office of Media and Design