Language Endangerment

In today's world, where the advent of social networking and the fast paced development of globalization reduce physical distance between people, one may wonder why linguists (and other scientists such as anthropologists or ethnobotanists) spend a lot of time and effort trying to salvage information on languages spoken by a handful of people or why these scientists lament over the fact that some languages (and other types of cultural knowledge) are on the verge of extinction. After all, wouldn't we all be better off ifwe spoke a single language? To answer this question, we will first define what it means for a language to be endangered and lay out the causes of endangerment. We will then take a brief look at linguistic diversity worldwide and, zooming in on the Pacific, we will see how language endangerment affects this area in particular. Finally, we will review some of the arguments that have been proposed in the literature to support or reject the idea that it is important to conserve linguistic diversit