Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM)

them to be studied after the relevant language has
died. But, since many endangered languages do
not have a writing system, their canons are at risk
of being lost forever. 76 Finally, the endangerment
of languages also threatens the work of natural
scientists. Many indigenous cultures, particularly
in the regions with the highest level of biodiversity,
have a unique knowledge of the local climate and
flora and fauna, and this knowledge is encoded in
their language. A uNeSCO study of the language of
the Anuesha people of the Peruvian Amazon, which
is severely endangered, for example, revealed a
number of terms for plants that had previously not
been recorded and studied. 77 Some claim that the
loss of local knowledge is not caused by language
endangerment but by the devaluation and erosion of
indigenous cultures. 78 Since this sociopolitical force
is also a cause of language endangerment, however,
it is clear that the abandonment of local language
and the loss of indigenous knowledge of nature are
related. thus, without the protection of endangered
languages, numerous academic disciplines will be
hurt, and the history and knowledge of indigenous
populations will be lost forever.
Perhaps the strongest, and also most controversial,
motivation for action to protect endangered
languages is the claim of an inherent connection
between language and culture. While everyone
concedes that there is a link between language and
culture, the nature of this connection is controversial.
Some anthropologists take an extreme view of
this relationship, claiming that different languages
represent different ways of looking at the world, or
worldviews. This idea is a modern adaptation of the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, also known as linguistic
relativity, which maintains that the structure and
lexicon of a language affect the way that its speakers
perceive the world. Whorf’s most famous example
for linguistic relativity was his understanding of the
ways of speaking about time in Hopi, an indigenous
language of the American Southwest. He believed that
the Hopi people had a different conception of time
than English speakers because the Hopi language did
not have words for distinct units of time, like English’s
“day” and “year.” A few experiments have shown
linguistic relativity to be applicable to certain ideas,
like shape and color; in one, researchers provided
evidence that speakers of Yucatec, a language that
refers to concrete nouns by units of their material,
were more likely to pay attention to objects’ materials
than forms, in contrast to speakers of English, which
makes the form of the object more salient than its
material. 79 Overall, however, linguistic relativity has
been essentially disproven over the past fifty years,
with no experimental evidence showing significant
differences in the conceptions of numbers and time
among speakers of various languages. 80
Some activists, linguists, and anthropologists rely
on a variation of linguistic relativity as an argument for
protecting endangered languages. they argue that
language death suppresses the distinct worldviews
that different cultures possess. As linguistic relativity
has been largely discredited, however, most
defenders of indigenous languages rely on the reverse
connection between language and culture, that a
society’s language is vital for the full representation
of its culture. Joshua Fishman goes as far as saying of
the language-culture connection: “Such a huge part
of every ethnoculture is linguistically expressed that it
is not wrong to say that most ethnocultural behaviors
would be impossible without their expression via the
particular language with which these behaviors have
been traditionally associated.” 81 While this position
may be too extreme, it explicates the intrinsic value
that indigenous languages have for the maintenance
of the culture of their speakers. Starting with the
most observable link, each language has its own
set of myths, literature, songs and poetry, as stated
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